Telnet and Serial
Communications

If you programming a complex show control event, you may want bidirectional
or advanced communication with Marquee. This can be achieved either over
Ethernet using the Telnet port or RS232 using the serial port on the processor.
In either case, the command set is identical. Marquee uses the Lua
programming language and syntax along with a collection of specific
HC.* script functions as shown
in the Macro Editor.

Setting Up a Telnet Connection

Marquee is always ready to accept multiple telnet connections. There
is no need to open a port with the SerialOpen function as described below.
If you have hardware on-line, the connections will remain open indefinitely.
If you are running the Off_Line software without a dongle,
the connection will close after a reasonable amount of time and no further
connections will be allowed until you restart the software.

On
your development machine, open HyperTerminal and connect using the Windsock
connection. Use "localhost" as the Host address if Marquee is
on the same machine or the specific IP address if it is on your network:

When Marquee responds, it will prompt you like
this:

You can now type any
one of the "local commands" ('help' is very useful). Your
real show control application may want to send a 'noecho' and 'noprompt'
string right after connection if you don't need the returning data to
verify communications.

For verification of
the format that the script needs to be in syntactically, build your scripts
in Marquee's Macro Script Editor:

When you have tested
it thoroughly using the [TEST]
button, select the specific lines (or you can right click in the right
hand pane, choose Select All)
then Copy.

Back in HyperTerminal,
right-click and choose Paste To Host.
You should see the result (whatever that may be) happen in Marquee.

If you want to get information
back from Marquee, you must format the return value into a print()
function on the last line of your routine.

Once your are
satisfied with your connection and data format, copy the commands into
your real show control application.

Setting Up Serial Communications

Install
a Null Modem cable between your show control computer and the Marquee
processor.

Program
and run a SerialOpen script specifically using the script argument. It
would be a good idea to put this in the cue action
of the first cue in an AutoRun Cuelist:

For
testing purposes run HyperTerminal on your show control PC. Make a new
connection using the appropriate COM: port. Also ensure that the parameters
in HyperTerminal match those in your SerialOpen script:

Once
you make the connection, you will see a prompt similar to the one in step
2 above in the Telnet connection example. The first command your show
control application may want to send is the 'noprompt' and 'noecho' commands
if it is not using them for handshakes.